Halo Infinite Slips Outside Of Xbox's Top 5 Most-Played Games

It has almost been three months since 343 Industries pleasantly surprised Halo fans by launching Infinite a whole month early. The first Halo for six years got an incredibly warm welcome. Not just because of multiplayer's surprise arrival, but because most of its players agree it's a pretty great game. Yes, there have been problems, but it is far from the most troubled game to have launched in the last 12 months.

Despite the positive reaction to Infinite when it launched, and then again when its campaign arrived, 343 hasn't been able to stop people from leaving the game behind. Forbes reports Infinite has dropped out of Xbox's top five games for the first time since launch. Not a huge problem if the titles surpassing it are newer releases, but that's not the case.

All five of the games above Infinite in Xbox's top five right now are titles that launched long before Infinite arrived. Fortnite, Warzone, GTA 5, Roblox, and Apex Legends. The multiplayer element of Infinite is free to play to anyone with an Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, or PC capable of handling it, so there really is no excuse as to why its popularity is dwindling other than players losing interest.

Speaking of PC, Infinite is struggling on its non-Xbox platform even more. The game is regularly outside of Steam's 100 most played when it comes to concurrent player count, and even when servers are at their busiest it struggles to break into the top 50. There are bigger problems at play here, and it might simply be that the driving force behind multiplayer shooters like Halo not holding people's interest as much as they used to is because of the rise of battle royales.

Three of the five games above Halo in the Xbox rankings are BR based titles. Fortnite's popularity refuses to drop, no matter what happens, and the same goes for Apex Legends. Whether 343 likes it or not, the solution to keeping Infinite relevant for longer than a few months might be to add a BR mode. There's still Forge and co-op multiplayer to come, of course, both of which will likely result in spikes to player counts across all Infinite's platforms.